Fraunhofer IEE

Capacity Building for India’s Energy Transition

Kassel (GER), November 2019 - Together with the Indian institute IIT Mumbai and partners from industry, The Fraunhofer Institute for Energy Economics and Energy System Technology IEE has launched a capacity building program for energy system transformation in India. The focus of this program is on grid integration of renewable energy. It was initiated by the German Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit GIZ and aims at employees of Indian grid operators who are active in grid operation and management. The training program combines online and presence modules in topics such as generation, forecasting, integration, control, and visualization of renewable energies, as well as market mechanisms, regulation, and politics.

The targets for expanding the use of renewable energy in India are ambitious. Overall, the world’s eleventh-largest country is aiming to install new production capacities for renewable energy, with a capacity of 500 gigawatts over the next ten years. By 2030, at least 40% of India's electricity is to come from renewable sources.
Power generation from wind and solar sources depends heavily on the weather. Intermittent generation poses new challenges for grid operators, who are responsible for secure grid operation. Therefore, at the institutional level, the Indian government is opening eleven REMC centers (Renewable Energy Management Centers), which, together with the existing LDC centers (Load Dispatch Centers), will support the further integration of renewable energies into the electricity grid.
There has been a lack of targeted training programs in India that qualify grid operators' employees to manage the system integration of renewable electricity generators in these REMC centers. In particular, the knowledge of which political, regulatory, market-related, and technical instruments are available to integrate a higher proportion of renewable energies into the grid needs to be further developed.
The Indian Government’s Ministry of New and Renewable Energy and the Ministry of Energy are cooperating with the German government on the »Green Energy Corridors« (IGEN-GEC) project in order to meet the challenges of grid integration of high shares of renewable energy with solutions for India. The GIZ implements the project in cooperation with various Indian governmental authorities. The training program for grid operators was developed by GIZ in cooperation with Power System Operation Corporation Ltd. (POSOCO) and the National Power Training Institute (NPTI).

They were supported by experts from the Fraunhofer IEE, the German companies Energynautics and Overspeed, and the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay. For Fraunhofer IEE, Prof. Dr. Martin Braun contributed his expertise to the program design; Dr. Bernhard Ernst developed the three topics "Forecasting of Renewables", "Balancing and Scheduling", and "Policy Regulatory and Market Mechanisms"; and Dr. Gunther Arnold the topic "Grid Codes".

Under the direction of Fraunhofer IEE, the implementation of the "REMC Training in India" has now begun. The first part is designed as a three-month online course supplemented by on-site training in India. The first course took place in the training rooms of the National Power Training Institute (NPTI) in New Delhi/Faridabad with about twenty participants. In the second course, the project partners Fraunhofer IEE, Overspeed, Energynautics, and IIT Mumbai trained another fifty engineers in Bangalore from 26-31 August 2019. The third and for the time being last training course will take place in January/February 2020 in the Indian state of Kerala.